ADEO: Giving a global DIY leader the building blocks to become a digital home improvement hub
About ADEO
ADEO is the third largest player worldwide in the home improvement market, providing home life, tooling, and DIY supplies for individuals and trade through 32 interconnected companies across 15 countries.
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SFEIR is a community of more than 600 developers, offering innovative solutions to small and large businesses.
ADEO has built an application development platform on Google Cloud that enables employees to access resources faster, reducing time to market for applications that improve customer service.
Google Cloud results
- Speeds up time to market by making it quicker and easier to access infrastructure for a project
- Offers simple tracking of resource usage with BigQuery and Looker Studio
- Enables secure global interconnections between APIs using Virtual Private Cloud
Provisions resources in 20 mins instead of up to four days
With more people looking to “improve, not move,” the DIY sector is expanding globally, with a forecast CAGR of close to 4%. One of the key players in the international market is the ADEO group, which comprises 32 independent and interconned companies and is the French market leader. ADEO’s brands include Leroy Merlin, which provides building supplies for DIYers and professionals, and Zodio, which is focused on homewares and decoration. After expanding to Italy, Russia, and Brazil, the group is now present in 15 countries and on three continents.
“Our goal at ADEO is to be useful to our 450 million customers around the world, helping them to make their dreams of a better home come true,” explains Renaud Pelloux, Product Leader at ADEO. “Our aim is to grow organically by offering great customer satisfaction and to become a market leader in every country that we’re present in.” ADEO provides solutions that help all its business units and brands to support their customers, with a focus on supporting employees to use their initiative. “We want to encourage our staff to take the initiative, as we really believe in the importance of the human factor in terms of achieving great things,” says Renaud.
“As well as the creation of new solutions for customers, our digital transformation will reach every part of the company. Any of our employees should be able to turn their idea for a digital solution into reality, using cloud-based development tools, accessing infrastructure with a few clicks.” Renaud Pelloux, Product Leader, ADEO
As the companies within the ADEO group face increasing competition from online retailers, in 2017 ADEO’s CEO Phillippe Zimmerman launched a global strategy for the digital transformation of the company. Its aims are to develop online activity and provide new customer solutions through the creation of digital applications. With its on-premises data center, it was taking up to four days to provision a complete environment in order to build a new application. Renaud and the IT team wanted a way to provision resources faster and help developers work more independently.
In order to empower its 120,000 employees to drive this change, ADEO’s IT team decided to build an internal development platform to speed up the delivery of new projects and make it easier to create new solutions that work with its legacy applications. After carrying out tests with several providers, it chose Google Cloud on the strength of its data analysis tools and the fact it was equal in terms of integration with third-party applications.
“As well as the creation of new solutions for customers, our digital transformation will reach every part of the company,” says Renaud. “Any of our employees should be able to turn their idea for a digital solution into reality using cloud-based development tools, accessing infrastructure with a few clicks. If a sales assistant on the shop floor who’s keen on tech has an idea for a script that could improve their day-to-day tasks, my dream is for them to be able to access the resources to try out that idea.”
Building an internal platform for faster provisioning
ADEO built an internal platform it calls the Landing Zone on Google Cloud as a way to automate processes and easily deploy customized configurations. “Although we’re in the process of migrating everything to the cloud, we still have a lot of legacy applications that we have to work with,” explains Renaud. “So we needed to offer internal private network connectivity between APIs, at scale.”
The idea for the Landing Zone originated in a workshop held with developers from SFEIR. SFEIR then helped to build the solution, as well as provide extensive training for Renaud’s team. “Three SFEIR developers work as part of my team, and one of them is also qualified to deliver training,” says Renaud. “It works really well, as they can combine theoretical knowledge with a practical understanding of our environment.”
“Maximizing automation is important because although we currently have around 600 Landing Zone projects, in two or three years we expect to have 5,000. With Cloud Functions, we can easily launch scripts without worrying about where that script is hosted or executed, which saves us time.”
—Renaud Pelloux, Product Leader, ADEOMaking it easier to configure applications and build faster
The Landing Zone is based around a serverless architecture that leverages App Engine, Cloud Functions, and Pub/Sub to automate application and script configurations, as well as security checks. “Maximizing automation is important because although we currently have around 600 Landing Zone projects, in two or three years we expect to have 5,000,” says Renaud. “With Cloud Functions, we can easily launch scripts without worrying about where that script is hosted or executed, which saves us time.”
Via the platform, users can access preconfigured Google Cloud tools to build their project as quickly as possible, such as preconfigured Google Kubernetes Engine clusters and Compute Engine VMs.
To provide secure connectivity between APIs and between regions, ADEO makes use of Virtual Private Cloud and the global Google Cloud network and is able to easily manage its infrastructure across the three regions it uses within a single Google Cloud project. With BigQuery, ADEO is also able to easily track and analyze usage, displaying information in easily accessible ways using Looker Studio. “We’re able to break down usage by department, so managers can track exactly what employees are using,” explains Renaud. “That way, they can see if resources are being effectively allocated and how to optimize spending.”
“One main benefit of Google Cloud for us is how much faster we can now build new applications, facilitate tests, and only pay for what we use, instead of having to invest in additional infrastructure to test out an idea. Improved speed and agility leads to improved customer service.”
—Renaud Pelloux, Product Leader, ADEOSpeeding up time to market and reducing costs
ADEO’s employees have been using Landing Zone environments to build all kinds of projects, from large applications to small scripts. Some of these applications are there for our customers to use, to help them design the layout of a kitchen, for example, or book in a delivery. One of the largest is OPUS, an internal product referencing app that was hosted on-premises in a previous version. “Since the OPUS application was rebuilt on App Engine, previous performance issues have been eliminated, thanks to easy scaling, and infrastructure costs are 45% less,” says Renaud.
By using the Landing Zone on Google Cloud, ADEO employees can access the resources they need to start building a project in 20 minutes, compared to previously having to wait up to four days for project infrastructure to be provisioned. “One main benefit of Google Cloud for us is how much faster we can now build new applications, facilitate tests, and only pay for what we use, instead of having to invest in additional infrastructure to test out an idea,” says Renaud. “Improved speed and agility leads to improved customer service.”
ADEO is now planning to move all its applications over to Google Cloud, using the Landing Zone platform to rebuild them as cloud-native. “We’re putting a lot of energy into moving everything over in the right way, rebuilding as we go,” says Renaud. “In the future, we’re interested in using Anthos to enable us to use Google Cloud tools consistently in hybrid on-premises and cloud environments if we want to.”
To power its further development, ADEO is putting its trust in Google Cloud and the innovative capabilities of its own employees.
“Google Cloud is central to our digital transformation,” says Renaud. “At ADEO, we believe in the importance of human initiative, and our platform on Google Cloud is helping us support the development of individual initiative, ideas, and autonomy. That’s the way to motivate people to make great things.”
Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.
Contact us
About ADEO
ADEO is the third largest player worldwide in the home improvement market, providing home life, tooling, and DIY supplies for individuals and trade through 32 interconnected companies across 15 countries.
About SFEIR
SFEIR is a community of more than 600 developers, offering innovative solutions to small and large businesses.